From changes to teacher evaluation to the inner workings of the teachers’ unions to new developments in teacher preparation, veteran reporter Stephen Sawchuk and contributing writer Emmanuel Felton keep you up to date on the biggest issues shaping the teaching profession today.

NEA Membership Continues to Drop, But More Slowly

The number of National Education Association members continues to decline, though by a smaller increment than it has gone down in recent years.

NEA officials said that the union lost about 16,000 members in 2013-14, bringing its total membership down—for the first time in eight years—to just under 3 million. (According to its labor filings, NEA lost 64,000 members in 2012-13 and about 100,000 in 2011-12.)

NEA first crossed the 3 million-member mark back in 2006, when its New York chapter merged with the New York State Union of Teachers, then an AFT affliate.

At the July 2 budget hearing, NEA Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle said: "At the national level, we have had a slow recovery back from the pre-recession time of 2008. It's been much slower at the state and local level. Districts are continuing to lay off folks."

The number of full-time equivalents (FTE), which combines part-time employees rather than counting live bodies, for 2013-14 was 2,450,000. For 2014-15, the union projects the number of FTEs will stay very close to the same. However, for 2015-16, NEA expects to lose about 25,000 FTEs, including 20,000 teachers.

The total revenue proposed for 2014-15 is nearly $355 million. The NEA expects that to decline by about $700,000 for 2015-16.

In discussing the many challenges facing the union over the next few years, Ms. Pringle pointed to two recent legal casesthe Vergara lawsuit, which found that California teacher-tenure laws violated students' rights, and the Supreme Court's Harris v. Quinn, which found that home health-care workers cannot be required to contribute union bargaining feesthat she said "have a chance to significantly change our union."

Those cases "set us up for a lot of work ahead to make sure we protect the rights of our members and protect our rights to collect dues and do what we need to do as a union."

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